Korean-Japanese movie is deep in detail

Although the movie, "Sunaebo¡± (Asako in Ruby Shoes), has all the appearance of a romance starting with the title, just as the movie seems to turn romantic, it comes to an end. The movie covers the superficial exchange of two people, one in Seoul and another in Tokyo, and is more a movie leading up to love. The movie focuses in detail on the tangle of involvement leading to true love in a world of countless encounters.

A ward office employee, Woo-In (Lee Jung-Jae), in Seoul is a man of near complete incompetence. Rejection by the girl he loves, Mi-Ah (Kim Min-Hee), turns him toward Internet pornography sites, where he falls in love with a Japanese girl, Asako, who resembles Mi-Ah.

A student in Tokyo preparing to take the college entrance exam, Aya (Dachibana Misato), is at the end of her ropes with her family nearly bankrupt. In her wish to die at the international dateline, she becomes a model on an adult Internet site as Asako, in order to earn money for a trip to the dateline.

The movie does not particularly portray a tragic situation but rather the lives of two depressed souls, Woo-In and Aya, who simply failed to find a direction in life. The movie also succeeds in portraying the people living around the two main characters. The very merit of the movie lies in the realistic characterizations and the wealth of attention to detail.